New mobile interface

[EricG]

When I open a conversation, there is the subject header, multiple messages, and an action footer. The last message is opened by default.

Why are those actions at the bottom? They duplicate actions available on each message. When I collapse the last message, they disappear.

If there are to be thread actions, I'd rather see delete, archive, and things that you commonly apply to all messages.

It would nice if I could drag the header or footer to a folder to move the thread.

[Berenburger]

Originally Posted by Berenburger

......But you triggered me to another question: Is it possible to add this Rich Editor to the Notes screen in the Classic interface?

Originally Posted by n5bb

Yes, this tweak also works in the Classic interface.

It seems it's hard to express myself at the moment. I mean: a rich editor in the Notepad screen (in the classic interface).

[n5bb]

Originally Posted by Berenburger

It seems it's hard to express myself at the moment. I mean: a rich editor in the Notepad screen (in the classic interface).

Oops ... what I meant to say is that the tweak I posted earlier in this thread (which only affects the Files screen) also works in Classic.

The notepad AES encryption/decryption updated tweak I posted here still works with Classic, but fails with the new interface Notes screen introduced earlier this week. This tweak modifies the content of the notepad:
http://www.emaildiscussions.com/show...618#post553618

But ... just because you asked for it ... I was able to replace my encryption/decryption tweak with one which provides a rich text editor in the classic interface Notepad screen. I haven't fully tested it, but it seems to work with the following limitations:

• The current AJAX user interface somehow marks a note as HTML or plaintext. But the classic interface has no such distinction. So if you want to use both user interfaces (classic and current), you need to create the rich text note in the current interface. You can edit such a note in either interface.
• I don't know how to detect the rich text mode in the classic interface javascript code. So the classic rich text editor will always be active. You can't disable it unless you disable the tweak.
• Existing plaintext notes (or new plaintext notes created in the current user interface) will appear with no end of line characters, so they will appear as one long line.
• With those caveats, here is the tweaks.js needed:

// Classic Notepad HTML editor -- Bill n5bb 2013.10.22
function twkLoadScript(filename){  // function to load additional javascript file from custom-ui/js/
   window.addEvent('domready',function(){
       new Asset.javascript($$('script[src*=tweaks.js]')[0].src.replace("tweaks.js", filename));
})}
window.addEvent('domready', function() {
  if (document.body.id != 'notepad') return;
  var textEditor = $E('textarea');
    {
        textEditor.set('id','FFP-Contents');
        new Asset.javascript('https://www.fastmail.fm/3pp/fck-latest/fckeditor.js');
        setTimeout(function() {
            var oFCKeditor = new FCKeditor('FFP-Contents') ;
            oFCKeditor.BasePath = "/3pp/fck-latest/";
            oFCKeditor.Height   = document.documentElement.clientHeight-20; 
/* Set the height to the initial window size - 20 for the scrollbar */
            oFCKeditor.ReplaceTextarea();
        }, 200);
    }
});

// Notepad screen:  move "Create new note" button to top, followed by "Sort by" -- Bill n5bb 2011.05.02
window.addEvent('domready', function () {
   if ($('notepad')) {
      ($$('div.sortBy')[0]).inject($$('.collapseContainer')[0],'top');
      ($$('li.listButton')[0]).inject($$('.collapseContainer')[0],'top');
   }
});

Bill

[Drencrom]

Regardless of which browser I use, I cannot access "Files" from my Android phone. This option is just not available, nowhere to be found. Is it supposed to be this way?

[n5bb]

Sorry that there are several conversations going on in parallel in this thread. This message concerns forwarding messages using mobile devices.

Originally Posted by gardenweed

Bill - thanks for your interest.
I'm using the manual forward Compose screen.
So in the open email, I am hitting the "Forward" button at the bottom of the email body.
(Note that the conversion to plain text only seems to happen if I use the mobile interface.)...

The short answer is that you can't forward the Rich Text (HTML) versions of messages using the mobile interface, so you are only forwarding the plaintext version of the message.

The complete answer is rather complex, since there are several different methods to "forward" a message and we now have a wide range of screen sizes in our devices. Here goes (with the default conversation view and other default settings assumed):

• Email messages can be created in plain-text-only format, rich and plain text mixed format, or rich-text-only format. The rich-text-only messages are usually spam, so good messages will normally always have a plain text part (and optionally a rich text part).
  • When forwarding or replying using a PC, by default the Compose screen is automatically set to rich text editing format if the original message had a rich text section.
  • If no rich text is found, the plain text editor is used.
  • Most email client will automatically underline web links and email addresses in plain text message, and allow the user to click them to open a browser or compose a new message to an address. This is all done at the receiving end, and if you look at the raw message contents of a plain text message you will see that only normal text characters are sent in all cases.
  • This is why forwarding the plain text portion of the message appears to work in some but not all cases, since in many cases the link is embedded in the HTML and is not shown in the plain text.
• If you log into the normal (not beta and not classic) web interface with a PC (or an iPad), you can "forward" a message in various manners:
  • Forward button (at the bottom of the message reading screen): This creates a new message with the Compose editor containing both the body contents and the attachments of the last message in the conversation. In fact, you must have opened the final message in the conversation (which might be from you) to see the bottom Reply, Reply to All, and Forward buttons. Fwd: is added to the Subject.
  • More>Forward button (at the right on the message reading screen): This creates a new message with the Compose editor containing both the body contents and the attachments of the specific message which is opened at the more tool. This allows you to forward any message you wish in the conversation, not just the most recent one. Fwd: is added to the Subject.
  • More>Forward As Attachment button (at the right on the message reading screen): This creates a new message with the Compose editor body empty (with the optional compose signature) and with an attachment containing the original specific message which is opened at the more tool. This allows you to forward the original raw contents of a message without any editing. Fwd: is added to the Subject.
  • More>Edit As New button (at the right on the message reading screen): This creates a new message with the Compose editor containing both the body contents and the attachments of the specific message which is opened at the more tool. The From is set to your default personality, but the To and Cc fields are set to those in the original message, and the Subject and message body are not changed in any way. This allows you to re-send a message you (or someone else) previously sent and edit anything you wish. So you could use this to forward a message without the subject and body slight modifications in the normal forwarding process by simply changing the destination addresses. Normally the message would appear to come from you.
  • More>Redirect... button (at the right on the message reading screen): This opens a dialog box (Send a copy of the message to:) with a field where you can enter an email address. This works similar to Bcc, and the recipient will receive the message just as you did, with the original From and To addresses, subject, body, and attachments. Only by examining the full headers would it be obvious that the message was redirected by you. Resent-..., Return-Path, and other headers are added which show your Fastmail login address, so if the recipient replies the reply will go to you.

Now what happens when you try this with a mobile webmail client? There are several problems:

• At this time, most of the forwarding methods I described above are not available on the mobile device. The bottom Forward button is the only forwarding method available on a mobile device. My guess is that this is due to the limited screen size and the wish by the developers to keep the mobile interface as simple as possible. But this means that you can't redirect the message or forward it as an attachment (which would not require the rich text compose features).
• The mobile compose screen on a small device has no room for the Rich Text (HTML) formatting tools. So only plaintext editing mode is enabled in the small device Compose screen. This affects creating new messages, forwarding, and replying to Rich Text messages with an iPhone.
• Apple iOS has bugs in the services required for Rich Text editing. So in the normal web interface, Rich Text editing is disabled even on an iPad.
  • When iOS 7 recently was introduced, Fastmail hoped the bugs would be fixed so they enabled Rich Text editing on the iPad.
  • However I pointed out several major bugs when using an iPad, and they turned Rich Text editing for the iPad back off a few days ago.
  • If you log into the beta interface (https://beta.fastmail.fm) with an iPad using iOS 7.x, you will be able to use the Rich Text Compose screen. The major bug I see is related to the text entry focus point. You many need to use a space or backspace character before entering text, and in some cases the cursor doesn't agree with the actual text entry point. The Rich Text features in general work, but the text entry point focus problem is extremely aggravating, and I have given up on some messages when I lost control of where I was entering text. Hopefully this will be fixed, but it seems that Apple has been slow to fix the bugs related to these problems. Fastmail has an Apple developer account and has been working actively on these issues.
• I don't have a non-iOS mobile device, so I can't comment on that experience. But my guess is that any phone-sized device currently has no way to use Rich Text editing on the Compose screen.

Bill

[n5bb]

Originally Posted by Drencrom

Regardless of which browser I use, I cannot access "Files" from my Android phone. This option is just not available, nowhere to be found. Is it supposed to be this way?

I see the same on my iPhone. I think that the Files features are currently limited to iPad and larger screen sizes.

Bill

[gardenweed]

Bill,
Thanks for taking the time to write this very detailed reply.

What I'm taking away from your explanation is that if the link is embedded rather than written in plain text, then when forwarded by the mobile interface, the link is lost.

So I tried this:
I sent an email from Gmail to my FM account.
I set two links in my email:

1. One link written out simply as http://www.etc
2. For the 2nd link I wrote the word "Indirect" and used the Gmail compose tool to embed a link to this word.

I sent this email to my FM account.
Inside the mobile interface I checked each link. Both worked.
Inside the mobile interface I forwarded this email to my Hotmail account.

Inside Hotmail, both links appeared.
The first was written out in full, as in the original email.
However, the second link, the embedded one, had the word "Indirect" and next to it was the text for the actual link as follows: "<http://www... etc >"

Both the plain written out URL worked and the embedded URL.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
So some more investigation into the TeamBinder emails...

The emails that I receive from TeamBinder have embedded URL's.
These are the emails where the links are lost when I forward them using the mobile interface.

However compared to my simple test above, when the TeamBinder emails are forwarded, the text associated with the embedded link is not extracted and added to the plain text email.
And when I view the message source of the forwarded email, the URL information is not there.

So it seems that sometimes the URL of the embedded link is extracted and written into the plain text email when forwarded, and sometimes it isn't.
I'm assuming that there is something in the TeamBinder email which is causing the link URL not to be extracted.

Some things I notice about the TeamBinder URL's:

• They are https (I'm guessing this should make no difference)
• They are very long and get wrapped.

Maybe the length & wrapping breaks the recognition of a URL and it is dismissed?
Could it be the length of the embedded URL that causes the problem?

[n5bb]

Originally Posted by gardenweed

What I'm taking away from your explanation is that if the link is embedded rather than written in plain text, then when forwarded by the mobile interface, the link is lost...

Yes. But this is really caused by the system which created the original email. If the URL is clearly placed in the plain text portion of the original email, it will be forwarded.

Originally Posted by gardenweed

... Maybe the length & wrapping breaks the recognition of a URL and it is dismissed? Could it be the length of the embedded URL that causes the problem?

Yes, if the links are long this might be the culprit. The plain text Compose screen in Fastmail will enforce line wrapping on very long lines, and some email clients can't handle the URL split between two (or more) lines.

I would normally recommend sending such examples which don't work correctly to Rob Mueller at Fastmail, but he just left on a couple of week vacation. If you don't mind sharing such an email which fails mobile forwarding, please send me a private message here at EMD and I will reply with a personal email address you can forward that email to. I will look at it and find someone at Fastmail to look into this. Neil Jenkins has been working on the mobile email client, and I'm sure he would be interested in solving the problem you have found.

What would be nice would be if the mobile user could reply to or forward a rich text message and the following would happen:

• The mobile user would get a plaintext compose screen where they could add their comments to the top of the reply or forward.
• But the original rich text message would be concatenated (tacked on the end) of those comments back at the Fastmail server. On a mobile device, you really don't want to edit the original message, you just want to add a few comments and send the original message undisturbed.

Bill

[gardenweed]

Bill,
When I look at the raw message of the offending email (original state), the links embedded in the email are all inside <> angle brackets.

When I look at the raw message that has been forwarded by the mobile interface, the text with these links has disappeared altogether.

[n5bb]

Originally Posted by gardenweed

Bill,
When I look at the raw message of the offending email (original state), the links embedded in the email are all inside <> angle brackets.

When I look at the raw message that has been forwarded by the mobile interface, the text with these links has disappeared altogether.

Are you sure you are looking at the plain text portion of the raw messages? If I create a plain text message with a message body content such as:

test <www.fastmail.fm>  <http://www.fastmail.fm> end.

When forwarded by the mobile interface, that message body is identical in the forwarded message.

My guess is that you are looking at the HTML (rich text) portion, which include anchor tags which may look similar to the following:

<a href="http://www.google.com/">Google</a>

Again, my guess is that the URL is only in the rich text portion of the email body (which is not forwarded by the mobile interface). If the URL is fully shown in the plain text message body, it should be forwarded properly.

Bill

[gardenweed]

Whoa!

Something has changed!
Links are now showing in the forwarded messages.
But some are broken/incomplete.

This is quite a change. A couple of days ago the links did not show at all.
All the same, it still does not work properly. Some of the URL is being truncated, so the links are broken.

[gardenweed]

I spoke too soon.
I just tested another transmittal email and again the links were removed.

I'll provide more detail shortly.

[gardenweed]

Bill,

I think your explanations have solved the issue for me.

The transmittal that I just tested that forwarded no links had no links in the plain text section.

The email that I referred to above where I thought the links were working in the forwarded email was an older transmittal that I happen to chose.
This older transmittal email did have links in the plain text section as well as the HTML section, albeit they were mangled somewhat by the the receiving email reader (Gmail and Outlook web mail in this case). All the information was there but actual hot link was assigned to only part of the URL (so a copy & paste into a browser would have worked.)

Thank you for helping me understand what was causing the problem.

[n5bb]

I'm glad you understand what is happening. Unfortunately, forwarding (in general) often breaks various aspects of email.

Bill

[yetanother1]

I got my first tablet (Nexus 7, Android Jelly Bean) and logged into Fastmail and was surprised to see a different interface.

I tried to send a message and ran into the following problems that make it unusable:

1. When I typed the first letters of the recipient's email address in the "To:" field there was no auto complete of the address. Under the Classic interface when I typed "Joe", it would show the partial matches from my address book and I could pick the desired email address. This was not done in the new mobile interface.

2. I then tried to "Add from Address Book" and was presented with a list of all my contacts, but there was no Search capability to find the person I was interested in. I had to scroll, page at a time, through the list until I found the person I was looking for.

Also, there was no "Discard" of the message.

NOTE: I had "Use Classic Interface" checked on the login screen (as I do when not using a mobile device). When I unchecked the box things got much better.

I guess my questions are:
1. Should there even be a "Use Classic Interface" for mobile?
2. Since I'm no longer using the Classic Interface are there behaviors that I need to worry about? For example, threaded conversations. I'm no longer current in the differences between the Classic and new interfaces.

TIA